Slumdog Millionaire

Let me quote the words of Jaideep Sahni spoken in a FICCI Frames session a year ago. ‘If you roll gobar (bullshit) into a laddu (a golf ball size Indian sweet) and put a kaju (cashew nut) piece on top of it, it will still be gobar.’

And what would you call those who see Ganesha’s image in gobar? The followers of ‘Gobar Ganesh’. The fawning film aficionados who have been praising Slumdog Millionaire to skies fall into this exalted category.

Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy can keep Golden Globe and Oscar statuette (cashew nut pieces) on their heads or shove it up or down some shit hole, the fact remains; Slumdog Millionaire is a gobar film. Boyle claims his film is a tribute to the maximum city. It is not. It dishonors, distorts, and devalues Mumbai and its slum life. It uses hackneyed elements from these to add spurious gravitas to an implausible and dumb narrative. He is not the only one to be blamed. Vikas Swaroop’s novel, from which the screenplay of the film is adapted, is bad creative work, a clichéd hearsay representation of Mumbai and India, a standard phony perspective of an upper class Indian English writer.

 

Simon Beaufoy, the screenwriter of the film, picks up the basic structure of the narrative from Swaroop’s lowly literary work, and adds his own gory, grimy, and fake touches, with a blatantly racial western POV, to suit the sensibilities of ignorant firangi audiences. He reinforces their stupid half-baked exotic comprehension of India’s urban poverty. His idiocy transcends its own barrier when he introduces Alexander Duma’s Three Musketeers as a key metaphor in the film. Had the film been set in a British ghetto, it would have been titled Three Musketeers. The problem is, Swaroop’s Ram Mohammed Thomas may have read Duma’s tale of Three Musketeers since a padre brought him up; to transpose this idea on Muslim slum kids is a horrendous and pretentious bungle.

This is just one of the countless gaffes he makes. What was he doing in India while researching the subject? Watching Black Friday and rediscovering the route of the film’s long Tom and Jerry chase sequence between a goon and a policeman in the narrow lanes of Dharavi, the largest slum of Asia?  Or was he simply looking for situations to transplant his preconceived bogus notions and ideas of India, its poverty, and underworld. In spite of these inexcusable bloopers, he is being feted. Could he misrepresent the lives of Englishmen or black Americans with such gross inaccuracies in characterizations and content? The firangi critics and audiences would have banished him to the nowhere land.

I am also surprised at how the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences could overlook the obvious racial slurs in the film. The scene where the teenager Jamaal is being beaten up by the driver of the plundered Mercedes and the way the American tourist holds him close to her bosom with an express ramark about American generosity has blatant racial overtones. If this was not enough, Boyle and Beaufoy use a cheap subliminal subterfuge like highlighting the plaque bearing the name of the British architect of the Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus (Screw those who still call it Victoria Terminus) to rekindle the memories of the British Raj. As Jamaal sits on ground with folded knees close to his chin, waiting for his girl, the plaque and pillar next to him are cleverly highlighted to show the name of the architect. Itna moh khoye huey sunahare dinon ka jise jazb nahin kar paaye Boyle saheb aur dikha hi diya apni film mein kisi na kisi bahane..

In this fake and faltu enterprise, what is genuine is A.R. Rahman’s music, a convenient rehash of his old scores and themes. Great. Rahman will have the last laugh at the cost of firangi ignoramuses who voted for Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. He actually sounded amused when he got these nominations and awards. Gulzar must also be surprised that a commonplace Indian phrase like ‘Jai Ho…’ is being hailed as a lyrical masterpiece.



It’s the story of an ultra-lucky slum kid who goes on to win the TV game show ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ and finds his long lost love in the process. This classically simple, beautiful, and straightforward premise is mutilated mercilessly into a contrived, and convoluted screenplay with far-fetched scenes, and sequences inundated with shtick snippets of the slum life of Mumbai that jut out like sore and swollen thumbs. The central premise becomes incidental, the crap becomes the core. And lo and behold, it also overwhelms the cineastes and film aficionados across the globe. What the f#@# is going on here? Have we gone mad? Is this the kind of appreciation we have of cinema today?

Jamaal, the lucky Mumbai slum kid, is a fantastic invention, straight out of thin air. He is a chaiwala ( tea server) in a call centre though he looks, walks, and talks more like an upper class teenager, a cool dude, a public school product. He knows the name of the guy whose picture adorns a hundred dollar bill, but does not know who Gandhi was.  Remember, Jamaal is participating in the show in 2006, the year of Lagey Raho Munnabhai and Gandhigiri, a film that was a hit in single screen theatres across the nation. He speaks fluent English, better than Rahul Gandhi, with perfect diction and phoren accent. He knows who invented revolver because his juvenile delinquent brother shoots with a Colt. He knows the names of the three musketeers from Alexander Duma’s book, and he remembers that Lord Ram carries the bow and arrow in right hand since he had seen a little boy dressed as Lord Ram when he was a six or seven year old and was running to save his life from a marauding mob of Hindu fanatics. These are the questions he is asked during various stages of the game show, and he answers them to win his millions. Are you getting the point my Lord? Can't you see the obvious phoniness of it all?

The film is an amalgam of all kinds of jarring notes that keep cropping up every minute of its footage. Take the scene where the little boy Jamaal jumps into and wades through shit to get the autograph of his idol Amitabh Bachhan. Is it not funny? Of course it is funny and fake as well. Is it a great heart-warming representation of the touching relationship between a star crazy Indian slum kid and his idol? Hardly. It actually mocks the relationship.

Let us come to the riot scene. The film abandons its funniness all of a sudden. It also uses a blue painted kid dressed as Lord Ram as an important motif. The film is sending some serious message now. Cut to the scene where the goons who run a begging enterprise blind a little kid. It is obviously done for effects like the shit scene of Dharavi. It is also bizarre. Why does the Goon ask his protégé Saleem to get his little brother Jamaal to be blinded?  An eight-year-old kid is being taught to be ruthless and tough and become an instrument in blinding his own brother. Kya dhansoo scene hai baap? Chutiape ki saari hadein paar kar gayen hain Boyle saheb. Budhiheenata ka aisa udaharan khoje na mile.



And what was that joke of a strange scene where Jamaal and Saleem perform a trapeze act to steal chapattis from the compartment of a running train? They fall from the fast running train, keep rolling down and down, and reappear at Agara’s Taj Mahal, grown up, doing con jobs, stealing shoes, and speaking perfect English, with clipped diction. They must have got into Doon school after having survived the fall from the train. No, no,  the filmmaker was showing the passage of time to transition to the Taj Mahal scene quickly. Why did he do it? It is a flashback narrative. Where was the need to use such lowly cinematic ploys to fast forward the story?

Taj Mahal sequence is the funny track of the film, taken straight from Bunty & Babli with an additional element from what we have seen in countless Hollywood films: A well to do guy goes to a black ghetto to meet someone, parks his expensive car outside a decrepit apartment block, enters the building, and as he comes out, finds his car stripped to its bare body. Mr. Beaufoy it does not work like this in India. Indian car thieves take the car lock, stock, and barrel and ‘jootachors’ graduate into humble pickpockets, petty thieves, and not Colt carrying murderous goons. And maiming kids for beggary is a passé idea, used in Indian films of the sixties. These days kids are abducted and mutilated for the highly lucrative global racket called ‘human organ trade’.

But aren’t the filmmakers allowed to take cinematic liberties like these? Bollywood guys do it all the time, fictionalizing facts and factualising fiction. Right. Actually they do it with better finish, panache, and an understanding based on an insider view of the Indian reality. There is certain integrity about their art.  There were filmmakers like Manmohan Desai who made those larger than life films about characters who lived at the fringes of Indian society. However, they rarely misrepresented the Indian reality in as gross and mindless a manner as Boyle, Beaufoy, and their Indian collaborator, a sensation peddling upper class Indian English writer, have done.



Let me assert with great conviction; if Slumdog Millionaire is worth Golden Globe and Oscar awards, every Manmohan Desai movie deserves a few thousand Golden Globes and Oscars. Even the work of the new crop of Indian 'reality film' directors like Madhur Bhandarkar (Chandani Bar, a film about a Mumbai bar dancer, and his latter film Traffic Signal) is cinematically more valuable than Boyle’s ‘low budget’ outing. They have churned out better and more sensible stuff at a fraction of the cost that has gone into producing Slumdog (Rs.75 crores). Chandani Bar was made with a budget of Rs.50 lakhs. Come on guys, this is the time to get into Movie Process Outsourcing (MPO). If world cinema is all about peddling Indian shit, let it be. Let us sell firangis the real Dharavi shit if it makes them feel so good that they heap Golden Globes and Oscar nominations on it. Karne do saalon ko pooja hamare pakhanon ki. Paroso pakhana tashtari mein saza dhaja ke. Yeh gadhe isi ke kaabil hain.

And here is a passionate plea to some of our own filmfakers. Dump all the Tarantino and Boyle and Hollywood and French and Italian and Korean shit in the Mithi river. Unshackle and free your minds of these shibboleths. Jettison the images and ideas you have picked up knowingly or unknowingly from the so-called great masters. Stop paying tributes to them. Make a bonfire of your world cinema DVD collection now, on the terrace of your building aur shapath lo ki mud ke dekhoge nahin un filmon ko. Take a deep breath, do some pranayama, dhyan, dharana, and samadhi, and let great and genuine Indian ideas penetrate your thick heads.

You have mastered the technique, rule the art now with brand new indigenous and artistic perspectives of the world around you. Rise and shine, and go for the glory with confidence. Do not fight shy, and never be apologetic. Don’t run down your unique narrative approach and style. Be proud of your dance and song numbers. The cinema audiences around the world are bored to death. They are losing interest in this art form. It is your time now. You can conquer the world. Awake, arise, and stop not till you have reached the pinnacle of glory.

Bajne do nagada, macha do dhoom, hila do filmi duniya ko, kar do kamaal, kamar kaso, aage badho, badhe chalo, badhe chalo, aur Oscar ki to aisi ki taisi.


RKS